Monthly Archives: July 2014

Beautiful Land Across the Water

Native American tribes were thriving on what is now Virginia’s Eastern Shore for more than twenty centuries when Captain John Smith arrived in 1607. One of these tribes, led by Chief Barabokees and Emperor Waskawampe, had claimed as their own an island five miles off the Virginia coast, calling it Chincoteague, or “The Beautiful Land across the Water.” The Assateague tribe gave their name to the barrier island just to the east of Chincoteague.

The Virginia and Maryland Indian tribes cherished Chincoteague, Assateague, and the other barrier islands for their rich stores of game and shellfish. They valued the shells of the whelk so much, in fact, that they used them to create strips of beadwork, referred to as “Roanoke.” Roanoke was considered legal tender among the tribes, who traded for other goods.
Although Chincoteague Islanders no longer use shells to fund their daily lives, they cherish their “Beautiful Land across the Water” as much as the Native Americans did four centuries ago. The marshes, forests, and beaches of Chincoteague and Assateague fill the islanders’ lives with year-long beauty, and provide a million annual visitors with glimpses of nature that have changed little since the islands’ paths were followed by Indians stalking wild game.

Much of Chincoteague Island’s timelessness has been preserved in the work of the Island’s gifted artists’ colony. Canvases depicting sunrise over wetland grasses stretching as far as the eye can see, or capturing a moment of perfect stillness before a great white egret sets down at Goose Pond recall scenes which would have greeted the Algonquins on their approach to the Beautiful Land across the Water. The lines of a perfectly carved Chincoteague swan decoy provide a lasting memory of these magnificent birds swimming along the Chincoteague marshes at twilight.

The fields, beaches, and wetlands of Chincoteague and Assateague have fed and sheltered countless millions of migratory birds traveling the Atlantic Flyway through the centuries. The waterfowl, as well as the Island’s native deer population, were staples of the Native American diet. Bow hunters in limited numbers are still permitted to hunt deer on Assateague in order to control their population.

The island forests echo with the calls of nesting songbirds, like warblers, red-winged blackbirds, sparrows, and nut hatches. During the summer their songs are joined by those of cardinals, blue jays, and finches, while the staccato of woodpeckers keeps time.

The Native Americans relied not only on Chincoteague’s game but on the bounty of her waters for their survival. That bounty still draws a steady stream of recreational fishers each year, arriving in the spring for the first of the flounder runs, and continuing through the summer to head for deeper water to go after sharks, tuna bluefish, and in late July, the greatest of all game fish, marlin.

Then there are the oysters, clams, and crabs. The first Europeans to arrive on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 1607 startled a group of Native Americans roasting a shellfish feast, and dined on the clams, crabs, and oysters when the Indians disappeared into the forest. By the 1800s The Beautiful Land across the Water had become one of America’s premiere suppliers of clams and oysters.

Beautiful, bountiful, and bright with the promise of adventure, Chincoteague Island has something for everyone!

One of nature’s biggest mysteries is how the same oxygen on which we depend to keep us alive can also be one of the major contributors to our eventual aging and decline. Why?

Our bodies perform like furnaces. Their fuel is the food we eat, and the “heat” they produce is the energy that powers everything we do–even those cellular functions of which we are totally unaware. They use oxygen when converting food into energy, and in the process, some of the oxygen atoms lose an electron, becoming “free radicals”. Atoms with missing electrons are unhappy atoms.

Mother Nature, all the way down to the atomic level, loves a balance, so the first thing a free radical oxygen atom does is look around for its missing electron. If it can’t find the one it lost, it will look next door, at the molecules in the nearest cell. Then it may steal an electron from one of those molecules, fixing itself, but making a free radical of the robbed molecule. And a chain reaction can begin.

Or the free radical may simply “bond” with the neighboring molecule, and share an electron. In doing so, however, it may render the molecule useless for the proper functioning of the cell. If it enough free radicals bond with enough of its molecules, the cell can even die. And if enough cells die, our bodies will start failing. Disease and aging will move in.

Free radicals, in other words, are serious troublemakers.

But our bodies have defenses against free radicals, called anti-oxidants. We produce these anti-oxidants naturally, and while we are young, we produce them in abundance. As time passes, however, the balance in the battle begins to tip in favor of the accumulated free radicals, and may show up as sun-damaged skin, lowered resistance to infection, or even cancer and heart problems.

The answer? Call in the reinforcements by loading your diet with anti-oxidant rich foods. Vitamins A, C, E, and the Vitamin A precursor beta-carotene are the nemeses of free radicals. Where can you find them?

If you want to get the most antioxidant bang for your food bucks, load up on blueberries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University found that blueberries, of the forty fruits and vegetables they tested for anti-oxidants, “blue” away the competition.

Even the mighty nutritional powerhouses broccoli and spinach looked greener than usual, probably with envy, because the Tufts study showed that one would have to eat two to three servings of either of them to get the antioxidant benefits of a single serving of blueberries.

And blueberries have shown themselves to be equal-opportunity free radical destroyers. Blueberries’ nutrients penetrate the blood/brain barrier, and may both prevent and reverse age-related brain damage.

The compounds which give blueberries their color contain hundreds of nutrients not found elsewhere. The magic is in the blue. And blueberries, low in fat and great cholesterol fighters, are one food you can eat until you’re “blue in the face”!